Underwater Photography and Videography, News, Forums, Trips, Photo Contests :: Wetpixel.com

There is just a matter of weeks left for photographers and filmmakers to enter the 2009 British Underwater Image Festival (BUIF) sponsored by Canon and Cameras Underwater. There are thousands of pounds worth of prizes up for grabs for the winners and runners up in the seven competition categories for stills and videos. Finalists of BUIF 2009 will be showcased at the Dive Fest in Cornwall on 15-17 May 2009, while prints will go on a month-long public display at Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium in the summer.

The deadline for receipt of entries for BUIF 2009 is 31 March 2009. Judges include Alex Mustard, Colin Doeg, Charles Hood Simon Rogerson and Peter Scoones.

The winning images of the Beneath the Sea 2009 Worldwide Underwater Photography/Video Competition have been announced, with, as in previous years, many familiar names and Wetpixel personalities in the list of winners. The Best of Show was awarded to Wetpixel member Cal Mero for his photo of a leafy sea dragon.

All winning images will be shown at the Saturday night film festival during the weekend of Beneath the Sea‘s Ocean Adventure and Travel Exposition, March 27th, 28th and 29th, 2008, at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus, New Jersey. Congratulations, all!

The 45-day Wetpixel Ultimate Indonesia expedition is well underway. We spent 6 days diving our brains out in Lembeh Strait, and are now aboard the Seven Seas liveaboard vessel exploring Halmahera. Yesterday, we dove in a mangrove channel near Obit Island in Southern Halmahera.

I had planned on taking the day off to let my ears recover after 11 days of intense diving, but the group came back from the first dive, reporting a huge population of flasher wrasse in mere meters of water. I had to go see it for myself. At around 4pm, I dropped into the shallows and spent an hour watching over a dozen male flasher wrasse competing with each other in courtship behavior amongst their many harems…

At PMA last week, Canon announced a new AF fix for its flagship cameras, the EOS-1D Mark III and EOS-1Ds Mark III, related to the accuracy of focusing using other than the center AF point, and are offering free check-up and repair of affected cameras. In addition, the company released a firmware update for both cameras to fix minor issues with Live View and tether-modes, and implement the addition of more detailed error codes (instead of the standard “Error 99") to quickly identify the source of any problems.

At the same time, Adobe released an updated Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw v5.3, adding camera support for the Nikon D3X and the Olympus E-30 and fixing a variety of previous LR2 issues, including ”a memory leak could cause Lightroom to crash while attempting to process files with local adjustment.” Reports from the forums about the upgrade seem to be positive so far!

The 40th annual San Diego Underwater Photographic Society Film Festival, scheduled for Saturday evening, April 25, 2009 at the Qualcomm Hall in San Diego, CA, has begun selling tickets to attend the event. The evening will feature a film by Steve Drogin, matinee show with submissions by SDUPS members, and audience voting to determine the $500 first-place prize winner of the worldwide film contest.

This is bound to be a great event with a number of well-known personalities from the underwater world - purchase tickets online, or announce your plans to attend in the forums!

Underwater Journal Issue 10 was recently made available for download. Featured article topics include the Undersea Voyager project, a review of the Aquatica 40D housing by Wetpixel member Doug Ebersole, a summary article on digital point-and-shoot cameras, and report on the loggerhead turtle hatching.

Underwater Journal is a free PDF magazine, published bimonthly by Wetpixel member Walt Stearns.

X-Ray, an excellent (and free) online magazine oriented towards diving and underwater photography, has just announced the availability of issue #28. The issue includes articles on diving the Maldives’ Whale Shark Park, the Barents Sea in Russia, cave diving rebreathers, ice diving and underwater photography, and a portfolio by Frank Russell on “Fishy Found Objects.”

Download the latest issue of X-Ray Magazine with these stories, conservation and diving news, and much more…

Jason Heller has posted coverage of the 2009 Our World Underwater convention, which took place on February 20-22, 2009 in Illinois:

Over 15,000 people braved the cold to attend the 39th annual Our World Underwater show in Chicago over the weekend of Feb 20th - 22nd.

Since Our World Underwater is the first large scale scuba diving show of the year, often we have a chance to get our hands on some of the new underwater photography & video equipment that we have been reporting on for the couple of months prior, and this year was no different...

Scuba Diver Australasia field editor and Wetpixel member Doug Sloss (Sloss) will be hosting digital editing workshops at the Boston Sea Rovers 55th Clinic on March 7-8, 2009 in Boston, Massachusetts. “Photoshop CS4 for the Underwater Shooter” and “Lightroom 2 for Underwater Shooters” are ”informative classes designed to get you up and running with both programs and emphasize the adjustments required to effectively polish up your underwater images.”

The Boston Sea Rovers event will feature a number of additional industry speakers and presenters, including Stan Waterman, Ernie Brooks, Jeff Rotman, Berkley White, Ethan Gordon, and Paul Cater Deaton. Visit the BSR website for the full schedule of seminars and more information…

The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) is running a photo contest with dive travel and cash prizes with a deadline for submission of April 1, 2009. Only amateur photographers can enter (defined as those who make less than 20% of their income through photography), and photos that have been accepted for publication are ineligible.

Many Wetpixel members have placed in previous RSMAS competitions (with Jerry Kane taking the grand prize last year). You can submit up to three entries in each category (Wide Angle, Macro, Portrait), and entry is free. Winners will be announced on April 15, 2009 at the Sea Secrets Lecture Series.